The project will be led by Future by Lund, which is Lund Municipality's innovation platform that runs a large innovation network of industry partners, organizations, and academia. The registered partners of Lund Open Sensoring City are Axis Communications, Kraftringen, Lund University, Mobile Heights, Sensative, Sony, Telia and Trivector.  Ericsson, Volvo Cars and u-Blox are also in the project.

The project aims to build test environments together with Lund Municipality’s departments, including the Technical Services and Environmental Health departments. Future by Lund has also previously led similar projects in a successful manner, for example Smart Public Environments (Vinnova funded), which has established an open IoT-testbed in the city and delivered over 15 different sub-projects that are linked to public challenges and infrastructure of the city.

The project strives for solutions that focus on immediate challenges, including everything from emissions and safety to resource optimization and the prevention of traffic congestion linked to different vehicle flows. It could also involve solutions that target micro-flows (walking, cycling, electric scooter etc) that are just some of the ingredients to create a healthier and more meaningful lifestyle in the city.  

– Now we have the opportunity to use the testbed that we developed for the SOM-project (SOM stands for Smart Public Environments in Swedish) and take it further so that we can really use the city as a test-site, says Project Manager Anders Trana of Future by Lund. The project aims to connect physical places to digital services – it can be about how cars, buses, bicycles, and people move around the city – and by using real-time data these flows can be controlled by, for example, traffic lights in intersections and by lighting.

The testbed will offer three different testing possibilities. There are fixed places/zones (e.g. squares, crossings, inside buildings), moving places in vehicles that drive rings within the city, and by connections to the city infrastructure (e.g. electrical cabinets, street lighting, traffic lights etc.).

– Participating in the Lund Open Sensoring City project means that we as a local business with a global market can get access to a new platform where we can test and evaluate new innovations and solutions. Together with other local stakeholders we can share our experiences and learn what challenges cities face, and then find solutions together, says Veronica Sällberg, Global Business Development Manager Smart City, Axis Communications.

The project recognises the great need to better understand and develop the city based on the flows of people, bicycles, and other vehicles, that can be modified and created in the future based on real-time information, data platforms, applications and machine learning. Today, this capability is limited by the fragmentation of information in various ways such as analogue data, behind firewalls and in proprietary systems. Although there is a shift towards more open data and IoT-based systems, there are still many challenges left to solve.

The project runs from May 2020 to 2023.

The announcement "Testbäddar för samhällets utmaningar - genomförandeprojekt 2020" received 22 applications. Vinnova intends to support six implementation projects, including Lund’s with the following motivation: (quoted and translated from Vinnova’s decision statement)

“Lund wants to establish an open testbed for a future real-time society where people, organizations, infrastructure and sensor networks work together to create a sustainable environment. The project aims to establish a testbed with a range of sensors and sensor locations, different connection possibilities and open data platforms that can ultimately solve challenges more effectively and create new values.

In competition with other applications, this application is judged to have good potential to create a testbed that in the long-term can contribute to system effects thanks to a strong stakeholder network, good external monitoring and a strong connection with supporters of innovation. Furthermore, it is considered that the described testbed can create the conditions for test opportunities in a real environment in a way that is missing today.

The project team is judged to have the competence, commitment and credibility required to accomplish the project."

Contact person: Project Manager, Anders Trana 070-604 99 30

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Translation: Ben Dohrmann